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The Double Vision of Star Trek: Half-Humans, Evil Twins, and Science Fiction If you’ve never quite been able to squint hard enough mentally to bring a Star Trek episode, movie, series or concept —any of them, take your pick— into focus, if there always seems to be a double image, don’t bother adjusting your intellectual antenna. You’re seeing fine. The problems remaining, though, are why you’re seeing double, why you’re seeing Trek’s creators and writers advance one philosophy and utilize its opposite as a plot device, and why you should even care. Mike Hertenstein tells you why in The Double Vision of Star Trek: Half-Humans, Evil Twins and Science Fiction. The author, a Cornerstone magazine senior editor, manages to coax the reader into philosophical ruminations on pop culture in general, and Mr. Spock and friends in particular. (And if you doubt that, just look at the preceding two paragraphs.) Even better, the book will enhance your enjoyment of future viewings of anything Trek. Think of it as a conceptual companion. Hertenstein has gone over this territory to various degrees, both in the magazine and at Imaginarium seminars at Cornerstone Festival, so his theses and thoughts are well-developed, not to mention up to date. Though some parts get a little too detailed for this casual fan’s taste-and that would be my only criticism, besides some occasional sloppy copy editing —Hertenstein has done a great job of finding elements in Star Trek that have been there for the finding all along, bringing them together and looking at them as a whole. In fact, several times while reading Double Vision I mentally kicked myself for not having noticed something before. For instance, has anybody in any of the many Star Trek series —the original, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine or Voyager — ever taken the Prime Directive seriously, let alone obeyed it? Could they? Should they do so when encountering, say, the Borg? Double Vision’s purpose is to look through the frequent contradictions and inconsistencies of the various Star Trek series and movies, and to try to decipher the pop culture phenomenon’s tendency to betray its own intentions. Star Trek, Hertenstein seems to be saying, is its own evil twin — evil from its own humanist perspective, at least. It pushes pluralism and relativism, but invariably falls back on absolutes and parochialism. It simply can’t escape them. For all the high-mindedness of the Federation (who made them boss of the cosmos, anyway?), Captain Kirk is more likely to duke it out with somebody or blow something up at some point to settle a problem. As others also have pointed out, Star Trek’s version of science — and, frequently, storytelling technique— leaves a lot to be desired. Too often, the deux ex machina ("god in the machine") device is used, as some scientific marvel or plot twist that has no basis in possibility (as in "remodulating the Heisenberg Compensator") or an alien messiah comes to the rescue at the last possible minute. All rather amusing and frustrating, considering creator Gene Roddenberry’s humanist devotion to material reality’s limitations and his disdain of religion. Hertenstein probes all of these questions and more. Many more. One can conclude that he has watched way too many Trek episodes and needs to, yes, “get a life.” However, I know for a fact he has one, so I’m going to take this book for what it is — a fan’s critical look, from a Christian world view that embraces imagination, at a pervasive pop culture icon. C.S. Lewis would be proud. Mike Miller (A version of this review appeared in the Peoria Journal Star.)
Organic Faith: A Call to Authentic Christianity
When Evangelical Christians talk about doing "ministry",
what is often meant is "witnessing" or missionary work, or some other form of
evangelism. There is often a tendency to limit the definition of being a
Christian primarily to faith-what we believe in our heads and hearts. This
perspective is sometimes emphasized to the neglect of the works aspect of the
Gospel: some Evangelicals, even those heavily involved in Christian service,
try to save the souls of the lost but show little concern for their material
and social needs. Even worse, some are so caught up in matters of faith that
they forget to practice this faith in their daily lives and in the lives of
others.
Organic Faith is about a faith that works, a comprehensive faith that
practices what it preaches and does not dichotomize belief and corresponding
action. Ron Mitchell speaks from his experience of over 25 years as a
socially-involved Christian as he makes this "call to authentic
Christianity". Early on in his book, he clearly addresses the nature and
problem of sin as part of the human condition, for we must have a proper
understanding of this sickness that plagues all people if we are to try to
meet their needs. In a particularly potent chapter, Mitchell warns of the
dangers of simplistically labeling people or movements or ideas as wholly
good or wholly evil. He exhorts the reader to discern carefully, and to
recognize that those all and we ourselves have a mixed nature containing both
good and evil ("A World of Good and Evil?" was excerpted in Cornerstone Vol. 27, Iss. 114.).
Having reminded us of the root cause
of social ills and also that we are not ourselves unaffected, Mitchell urges
Christians to "transformity"; that is, to let Jesus transform not only our
faith but also our actions. Thus we will not conform to the evil of this
world, be it blatant or subtle, but will rather stand out as living epistles
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ by the testimony of our words and lives.
Ron Mitchell writes very clearly and his points are illustrated with examples
from history and his personal experiences, many of which involve the social
battle against racism in the United States and the Church's shortcomings in
this fight. His exposition of Scripture is enlightening, especially his
discussions of the temptations of Christ and his chapter titled "I Wasn't
Listening to the Sermon (on the Mount)". The book is somewhat deficient,
however, in its chapter structure: the structure of the final third of the
book is somewhat choppy. While the content here continues to be rich and
spiritually challenging, the latter chapters on community, urban service and
"secular" human services do not seem to fit strictly within the book's
central theme. That minor fault notwithstanding, I recommend Organic Faith as
a challenging call to walk the walk and to live as Christian professionals,
people who do what they profess.
Chitu
The Last Days Are Here Again: A History of the End Times
For the past few decades as the year 2000 has approached,
most of us have heard warnings from various quarters that the end of the
world is near. On the eve of the end of the second millenium, Richard Kyle
has written a book to try to put the apocalyptic expectations of the present
time into perspective.
As the title indicates, a major theme in Kyle's book is that for the past two
millenia, people of the Western world have thought at various times that they
were living in the last days of the earth. After a general overview on
apocalyptism, millenialism and eschatology, Kyle begins by giving the Old and
New Testament bases for apocalyptic belief. Early Christianity by and large
expected the world to end in a few centuries, until the Roman Catholic Church
institutionalized and adopted the amillenialist view, which looks to the
return of Christ after a long period of time. In spite of this official view,
variant apocalyptic movements occasionally arose in the Middle Ages, often
brought on by current events and situations such as the Crusades, the bubonic
plague and various Medieval reform movements. The Reformation also inspired
much end time thinking and apocalyptic action among Radicals and Protestants.
About the time of the Renaissance, ideas of the secular apocalypse began to
take form with the prophecies of Nostradamus.
A large portion of The Last Days Are Here Again is dedicated to
apocalyptism in America, describing the beliefs of the Puritans, and
explaining why postmillenialism (the belief that Christ will return after a
millenial age on earth) took a strong hold on American thinking. Kyle also
describes the beliefs of many smaller American apocalyptic movements. He then
tells about the rise of dispensationalism and explains how this once minority
opinion took hold and spread to become the predominant end-time view of
American Evangelical Christians. He completes his section on American
apocalyptism by describing the beliefs of several "fringe groups", including
Christian, occult/New Age and racist groups with apocalyptic hopes. It was
interesting to read in this chapter about the apocalyptism of the Jesus
People (participants of the Jesus Movement in general, not Jesus People USA
in particular).
Kyle then has a chapter on the secular apocalypse, end-time
fears that do not involve the supernatural intervention of God. These include
destruction by nuclear wars, environmental degradation, overpopulation and by
cosmic disasters. Kyle concludes his book with some comments on the
apocalyptic mood that has arisen with the approach of the year 2000.
The Last Days Are Here Again is a clearly-written book for a popular audience. The
repeated disappointment of people who time and time again have set dates for
the world to end should serve as a warning to date-setters and their
followers. Yet Richard Kyle does not discourage faith in prophecy or present
it as beyond comprehension: he closes the book with some balanced suggestions
on how Christians should regard biblical end-time prophecy. I recommend this
book to those interested in what the Western world has thought about the end
of time, and to those interested in the history of theology.
Chitu
Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring
The grotesque, as Robert Warren observed, is one of the
more blatant forms art takes to shake us into an awareness of life’s
“perilous paradoxicality.” (p. xi) Author Flannery O’Connor used the
grotesque in ways alienating to both the Church and world, yet she remained
unapologetic: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you
draw large and startling figures.” O’Connor was a Christian, and her desire
was to jolt a post-christian world into facing itself, its own loss. Her art
shocked, and by shocking, liberated.
Jill Baumgaertner’s Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring explores the
grotesque world that author invented. “O’Connor always pushes us back to the
agonizing scandal of the cross. That scandal has at its heart the recognition
that humanity is fallen and needs redemption... With defeat often comes the
realization that we are vulnerable and weak and cannot save ourselves." The
heart of that scandal is also the heart of O'Connor's fiction. Through her
freaks, misfits, and outrageous characters, she always brings us back to the
haunting truth that we are all broken and only a broken Savior can bring us
redemption. “What could be stranger than a God who decides to suffer with us?
What could be more uncomfortable or more violent than the cross? What could
be more comically grotesque than an individual trying to escape his own
identity as God’s child and in his rush out the temple door, smacking
straight into the Incarnation?”
A Proper Scaring is a Halley’s Bible
Handbook of sorts, enabling the reader to decipher the most immportant uses
of symbolism in O'Connor's work. In college I did a paper on O'Connor and
A Proper Scaring was my favorite resource; easy to read, engaging, and
memorable. This is a solid reference tool for students of literature who are
looking for criticism from a Christian perspective.
Tammy Perlmutter
A Return to Modesty
At last, at last, at last! Amidst the constant flux of
various ideas and opinions concerning the sexual revolution, women's
liberation movement and the resulting aftermath, a true child of the nineties
dares to raise her voice and speak the hard truth. With admirable poise,
articulation and humor, author Wendy Shalit brilliantly uncovers an essential
key to the state of our society today (particularly in regards to women and
men's attitudes towards them), and delivers the way in which we may change
and revert to another, different "sexual revolution", this time one of
modesty, honor, and Judeo-Christian values.
Shalit divides A Return to
Modesty into three sections. Part One deals with "The Problem". Shalit
details the way in which our culture has become increasingly numb to sexual
modesty, a problem mainly due to our casual attitudes towards gender, sex and
morality that originated in the sixties. These attitudes have not increased
freedom for men and women but, instead, have produced a worse kind of
bondage. More than ever before, thanks to early sex education in schools,
pornography, media etc., today's woman may generally be viewed by men and by
herself as a mere piece of meat, to be disposed of if she does not meet the
standard of worldly beauty and accomplishment, an attitude which has resulted
in increasing rates of eating disorders, self-mutilation habits, teen
promiscuity and teen pregnancy. More than ever before, today's man has lost
his sense not only of women's femininity but of his own masculinity, and
subsequently, the honor, sensitivity, and gallantry which was prevalent even
fifty years ago is now a rarety. Shalit makes her case with powerful
quotations throughout each chapter and examples from her own and others'
experiences with co-ed college dorms, feminist rallies, fourth grade sex
education classes, etc.
In the second part of the book, "The Forgotten
Ideal", Shalit describes just what it is we have lost. Drawing from such
sources as Rousseau, the Torah, the Apostle Paul, and Immanuel Kant (to list
just a few, and the whole book is chock full of terrific quotes from all
kinds of people--from Shakespeare to Simone de Beauvoir to Glamour magazine),
she deftly describes the beauty, the mystique, the purity and eroticism that
modest women once posessed, and the ability that these women had to inspire
men to be similarly virtuous and honorable. She details the immense power
that sexual modesty had until it was usurped and nearly destroyed (in the
name of open-mindedness and liberation) by sexual crudity, Playboys, and
androgynous stick-like models who boldly instruct the average women on what
she needs to, and should, look and behave like.
Finally, in Part Three,
titled "The Return", the Shalit suggests a complete cultural and societal
revival of sexual modesty. She calls for a return to old traditions and
values, stating that it is only in this way that we might redeem ourselves
from the abyss into which we have fallen.
Though Ms. Shalit argues a variety of reasons for this reversal, including
increased pleasure and eroticism, she clearly states that the most important
reason for sexual modesty is to retain innocence and purity in one's life,
before God and others.
The author does not openly claim to be a Christian in this book (she was
raised in a Jewish family, which may be the reason for her references to and
reverence for God), however, her writing is completely inundated with
Judeo-Christian morals and values, including general modesty in terms of
clothing and behavior, abstinence before marriage and monogamy after, and the
Phil. 4:8-like ideas of refraining from movies, music, magazines,
conversation, etc. which might pollute one's mind with impure thoughts and/or
ideas. Even with this said, she actually does an excellent job of remaining
almost completely politically neutral (I know it sounds unlikely, but trust
me on this one!). Liberals and conservatives alike will be equally moved and
compelled by her revolutionary (or not so revolutionary) ideas. Wendy Shalit
has simply garnered facts and information to present a stunning case for
modesty which no open mind will be able to ignore.
Annie Bumgarner
Christian Mythmakers: C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton
In this post-modern, Joseph Campbell era of “the story is
reality,” there have been a number of mostly inadequate attempts by
evangelicals to assault that growing consensus. Wheaton English professor
Rolland Hein has opted to carefully embrace the enemy rather than kill it,
and the result is a thought-provoking and mostly delightful ride through the
fantastic terrain of baptized imagination.
Mythmakers begins with a bang, a
Clyde Kilby essay on myth. “This is man’s predicament,” wrote Kilby in 1973,
“What man is, what he feels himself to be, makes a wasteland of language.”
The more we intellectualize to explain ourselves and our world, the more we
stand removed from that reality. Imagination, Kilby suggested, was the means
to restore both language and reality.
Hein uses, as his book’s title indicates, various Christian authors as
springboards to discuss myth and faith. By using these authors’ own works to
excite our imaginations, Hein heeds Kilby’s warning that to intellectually
dissect myth is to destroy it. While some readers may be annoyed to have, for
instance, the plot of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress retold in part to
them, most should find it both interesting and strangely new. Hein’s
explanation of the genius of Bunyan offers one such illumining moment: “...he
is distinct from earlier writers such as Edmund Spencer and John Milton, to
whom in his religious interests to whom in his religious interests he may be
compared. Their mythological heroes are removed from ordinary life. In
fashioning lowly characters, Bunyan demonstrated how common and widespread
are the foundational aspects of spiritual experience."
The treatments of various writers are not, unfortunately, all of the same
caliber. Worst-treated is Walter Wangerin, whose brilliant Dun Cow and
absolutely stunning tragedy, The Book of Sorrows, are ignored by Hein for a
two page treatment of Wangerin’s mediocre novel, The Crying for a
Vision. Hein likely chose the latter because it is rooted in a Native
American legend, but The Book of Sorrows seems to me a far more appropriate
choice to discuss mythmaking over.
On the other end of the spectrum, the chapters on Lewis, Tolkien, Charles
Williams, and George MacDonald are as meaty and thought-provoking as one
could wish. The strangeness of Williams as an individual was captured here,
as were the winsomeness of Tolkien and Lewis. But most winsome were the
worlds these men, and one woman, L’Engle, produced. Precocious little punk
that I was, I read L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time as a first or second
grader, and count it as the single book that baptized my own imagination. So
Hein’s inclusion of L’Engle seemed, from an evangelical point of view, overdue.
For those who would like a new loko at some of their favorite writers, or for
those interested in myth for its own sake, Roland Hein's Mythmakers delivers.
Jon Trott
A Prisoner: Released
This is the true story of Brian Brookheart, a hungry
little boy brought up in dirt-poor rural Illinois who finds drugs and theft
as his way to numb the pain of life. The living conditions he was raised with
(mockery from his peers, a father who was did hard time in federal prison and
who couldn't show kindness when released) bring the reader no surprise to
find Brian using crime as an easy way out — he thinks. Eventually, he winds
up in prison just like his dad, just like the man he swore he would never
become.
The story begins with Brian's incarceration in an Illinois prison,
flashes back to the early days of his life, and moves forward to tell how his
life was changed from the inside out, even behind bars. It gives practical
steps on how to resist sin and temptation and how to experience God's love
and forgiveness, and how to share that forgiveness with others.
The price of
this book is $10 (plus $2.50 shipping) for anyone on the "outside," and free
to anyone who asks for a copy while currently incarcerated in a correctional
institution. For your copy, please write: Brian Brookheart Ministries, 44
Music Square East #509, Nashville, TN 37203.
Eric Pement
Legistlating Morality
In their new book Legislating Morality, Norm Geisler and
Frank Turek create a forum for political conservatives and liberals on the
basis of Moral Law. They succeed in arguing against such statements as "stop
trying to cram your values down my throat" and "you can't legislate morality"
with the idea that morality is always legislated, whether they be by
conservative liberal, or libertarian leanings. It's another attempt by
Geisler to arm Evangelicals with ready answers for those hostile to their
conservative leanings. As in all his books, Geisler seems to want the common
man to understand how his faith can effect the larger spectrum of the world
around him. He has done that with introductions to Philosophy, Ethics,
Ecumenism, and now Politics. As always his style is instructive, concise, and
readable--appealing to the readers common sense.
The authors begin on basic
philosophic grounds to establish that morality is always legislated, then
asking, "But just whose will be legislated?". Their appeal to legislating
justice on the basis of innate Moral Law seems sound This book is monumental
in its scope in that it creates a forum for political dialogue,
representative of clear thinking that cuts through namecalling and
misrepresentations. To that end this book is an excellent tool. But, in
laying this virtual "playing field" for doing politics, their simulation
still has yet to be tested with its audience.
Part of the problem with this
book is finding its audience. Its obviously not intended only for Christians.
But who will read it? Released on Bethany House Publishers under the guise of
being the newest book on the church-state debate, it has a narrow press
field. To say this book is about church/state relations is to miss its scope
entirely. It actually develops for its readers an entrance into today's dirty
world of politics and gives them a glimmer of light to use in constructive
dialogue. But for all the good it offers, readers must realize dialogue
always opens a can of worms.
Legislating Morality will make its way into the
homes and schools of today's Evangelicals. After it does we will have to
decide whether to use it as tool for constructive dialogue with the rest of
the international community or reference it under 'church/state debate' and
let things stand as they are. If you are engaged in political discussion or
have a socio-political opinion on the way things are, this book is for you.
If you don't know but want to know more read it. If you believe there's a
Higher Good that can change the world around you and clean up the current
political scene, let this book get you thinking, praying, and talking.
Chris Rice
First published in Cornerstone (ISSN 0275-2743),
Vol. 28, Issue 116 (1998), p. 41, 46, 56, 58 |
Copyright © 1999 Cornerstone Communications, Inc.